An Ambitious No-Budget Student Design Project in Transportation Engineering

Abstract: Recently, our university started offering a new undergraduate program in civil engineering and has just had its first cohort of transportation engineering students; however, our department is yet to obtain licenses for software products in civil engineering, including traffic flow modeling software. With this background, this paper describes a no-budget class project that enables students to integrate the concepts they learned in class in the absence of traffic modeling software. In this project, students are required to evaluate the transportation facilities of a small city and to design a public transportation system for the city. Given no budget, a short timeline, and limited data sets, students are still able to complete the project by applying their knowledge on geometric design of highways, level of service analysis, transport planning, signalized and unsignalized intersections, pavement engineering and public transportation. The paper highlights faculty and student perspectives on the effectiveness of the project in setting the students up for future success and concludes with offering recommendations for educators on new civil engineering programs in their efforts to bring quality education to students despite technology constraints. By directly confronting the problem of scarce resources that characterizes many new civil engineering programs, this paper is a contribution to the advancement of transportation engineering education and social equity in the United States.